Hajimu Masuda

Profile: https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/3110-hajimu-masuda

For more than a decade, I have been interested in the crossroads of society and politics, and state and people. The beginning point for my interest may have been a two-month bicycle trip in the Middle East when I was nineteen years old, during which I learned through interactions with local people that diplomatic achievements, however important, are not the whole picture.

This realization made me more attentive to the life of everyday people and the popular political cultures behind politics and conflicts, leading me to pursue my first career as a newspaper journalist in Japan. While reporting on diverse topics in contemporary Japan, I developed interests in photography and history, as well as coming to feeling a need to study foreign languages, not only English but also Chinese and Korean. Thus, I moved to the United States, taught Japanese at an alternative high school in Southern California, learned these languages, and studied photography and history, leading me to eventually attaining a doctoral degree in history at Cornell University in 2012.

Although I eventually chose history as my profession with primary interests in global and international history as well as modern Japanese history, I continue to be passionate about pursuits that I have been following throughout my life: camping, cycling, traveling, and backpacking, as well as photography and journalism. When I am not doing archival research, writing a manuscript, or hitting the road, I am usually reading novels by Murakami Haruki.

TEACHING AREAS:

• Modern Japan: Conflict in History
• Student Movements in Asia
• Reconsidering the Cold War
• Decolonization in the 20th Century

CURRENT RESEARCH:

• The Cold War
• Decolonization
• Postwar Japan
• Social Movements
• U.S. Foreign Relations
• 20th Century Global History

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

• Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press, 2015)

Articles Essays, Book Chapters and Book Reviews:

• “Reconsidering U.S.-Japanese Relations History,” The Oxford Handbook of American Foreign Relations, Robert David Johnson ed. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
• “People’s War at Home: Toward a Global and Comparative Social History of the Cold War World,” CWIHP e-Dossier Series (Cold War International History Project, forthcoming)
• “The Cold War as a Social Mechanism: Toward an Analysis of Cold War Asia, not of the Cold War in Asia,” IIAS Newsletter 72 (forthcoming in 2015)
• Social Movements
• “Still Cozy After All These Years: Beijing’s Support for Pyongyang During the Korean War Explains Why It Still Backs Kim Today,” Foreign Policy, co-authored with Sergey Radchenko (June 25, 2015)
• “On the 65th Anniversary of the Korean War, It’s Worth Noting This: We Got the Meaning of the War Wrong,” History News Network (HNN) (June 22, 2015)
• “The Social Politics of Imagined Realities,” Harvard University Press Blog (February 12, 2015)
• “Japan,” Dictionary of American History: America in the World, Edited by Edward J. Blum et al. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2015)
• “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism, John Stone, Rutledge Dennis, Polly Rizova, Anthony D. Smith eds. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)
• “Kyodai dogakukai: Sengoshi ni okeru genbakuten no mou hitostu no imi [Kyoto University Student Association: Another Meaning of the A-bomb Exhibition in the Postwar Era],” Chosen no senso no jidai [The Age of the Korean War], Tessa-Morris Suzuki ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015)
• “Sex Work in Occupied Japan,” Book review of Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan by Sarah Kovner, H-Net Book Review (2014)
• “The Korean War’s Impacts on Society and Politics in Japan: Politics of Memory and the Making of Antiwar Activism” in Pierre Journoud ed., La guerre de Corée et ses enjeux stratégiques, de 1950 à nos jours [The Korean War and Its Strategic Issues From 1950 to the Present] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013)
• “The History of the Korean War and the History of China’s Present,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 19:3-4, 339-44.
• “The Korean War through the Prism of Chinese Society: Public Reactions and the Shaping of ‘Reality’ in the Communist State,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 14:3, 3-38.
• “Fear of World War III: Social Politics of Re-armament and Peace Movements in Japan during the Korean War, 1950-53,” Journal of Contemporary History, 47:3, 551-71.
• “Rumors of War: Immigration Disputes and the Social Construction of American-Japanese Relations, 1905-1913,” Diplomatic History, 33:1, 1-37. (Ranked the third most downloaded article in the journal).

INTERESTS:

• Cheong Poh Kwan, “Emperor – Another shot at whitewashing?” Straits Times Asia Report, Straits Times (June 14, 2013).
• Ngiam Xing Yi, “Welcome, Dr. Masuda,” Mnemozine, Issue 3 (2012)